NAFI YAO
Location:
Bousval, Genappe, Belgium
ARTIST BIO
Nafi Yao is a Belgium-based photographer and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of body, memory, family, and social narratives. Moving between documentary approaches and poetic construction, she develops long-term projects that engage with lived experience, intimate archives, and collective histories. Her practice often expands beyond the photographic print into installation formats, combining image sequences with text, textile elements, or spatial hanging systems.
Through series that examine domestic and mental load, intergenerational transmission, and the politics of representation, she treats photography as a situated research tool—one that can reveal what is usually kept off-centre: traces, gestures, absences, and what persists over time. She works independently and within collaborative contexts, including community-based and cultural initiatives.
ARTIST STATEMENT
Nafi Yao develops a practice at the crossroads of sensitive documentary photography and plastic intervention. Her work considers the photographic image not as a fixed object, but as an active surface shaped by time, gesture, and material. Rooted in an embodied and situated perspective, her projects explore the relationship between the intimate and the political through themes of the body, memory, transmission, and invisible labor.
